Might Does Not Make Wrong Right

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By Nidal Sakr

(MAF - 1/13/09) By all accounts, what is happening in Gaza today is a new chapter in history. Not so much because Israeli atrocities against Palestinians are unprecedented in historical proportions, but because the world conscience got a rude awakening when we all asked ourselves: “What if this happened to me and my family?”

For the first time, we could not help but to look at the Palestinian question from a moral and human perspective instead of political. We all saw the question in stark contrast with our political perceptions and personal convictions.

Certainly, the question of Palestine or Israel has been one that is essentially moral first and foremost, a fundamental question many thought we could forever evade.

Is human life equally sacred? Or do we place discriminatory scale on people’s lives according to our own inclinations?
If the answer is human life is NOT equally sacred, then we are simply Nazis or fascists who do not fit in a civilized or human world. After all, there is nothing moral about selective morality.

If the answer is yes, that human life is equally sacred, then we may need to look at the crisis in the right proportion.
Out of the million and a half people of Gaza, close to 1000 Palestinians killed to date is proportionally equivalent to 4,100 Israelis killed, while the more than 5,000 Palestinians injured so far amounts to shockingly 21,000 Israelis injured.

I submit that grand total Israeli casualties of the dead and injured since Israel's inception on occupied Palestine sixty some years ago, does not amount to merely half the proportion of Palestinians killed of 4,100, victims of only one Israeli aggression.
Self admittedly, the United States has been a full partner in Israeli assault. What that would proportionally mean in terms of US casualties is even more shocking.
Ready for this? Palestinian casualties in merely two weeks or so of Israeli assault would amount to a staggering 210,000 Americans dead, and 1,250,000 Americans injured.

Now let us all look at this from another perspective. When we lost 3000 in 9/11, we did not settle for any less than a global war that killed and injured millions in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. While we are yet to confess to our blunder in Afghanistan, insanity and irrationality of Iraq war is now undisputable.

As Iraqi life is equally sacred to American life, what if Iraq inflicted a proportional toll of American casualties equivalent to what we did to Iraqis? It suffices to say that number of American casualties in such a case would come close to all the millions killed in WWII.

Such proportionality may have traces in so called Judeo-Christian history as in Spanish Inquisition, and Holocaust for example, but luckily it goes in fundamental conflict with premises that govern the Islamic model.
However, the question of moral equivalency is one we cannot afford to either ignore or escape. As we all saw in Gaza, “Might Does Not Make Wrong Right,” and “Human Spirit Undoubtedly is Ever Un-Breakable.” The lesson we learned from the latest Israeli blunder is that you cannot go on forever distorting facts and truths about a human situation you choose to politicize.

In the end, it all comes down to one fact: “Injustice is Self-Destructive.” I contend that the first casualty of Gaza war is not the Palestinian victims. In Palestinian terms there is no more honorable death than dying for a cause. Their cause is to fight against oppression, occupation, and to die in pursuit of freedom. After all, even we Americans engrave the term “Live Free or Die” on our license plates, upholding such a value as humanly supreme.

The first casualty of Gaza War is the disputed morality of all who took part in Israeli aggression, namely Israel and all its supporters. Albeit baseless, Israel’s mere attempt to justify bombing schools, hospitals, orphanages, universities, food and medical supplies, rescue teams, ambulance crews, houses of worship, and civilian infrastructure, to name a few, is both repulsive and more shocking to blind Israeli supporters first and foremost.

By now, we all know that Israeli War on Gaza was in collusion with a number of parties, aside from Israel and the United States. What those parties have in common is that they are all dictatorial, illegitimate, and corrupt. Further, these very parties are primarily blamed for US blunder in the Middle East and for fueling the anti-American sentiment in the region.
Indeed, from the darkness of Gaza shines a new dawn, one in which we can all shed our bigotry, hate, and self destructiveness and see each other as humans in equal light. Indeed, the people of Gaza are the heroes of new age.

Instead of catastrophic “moral equivalency” predicament, we all have a chance to declare: Injustice no more, bigotry and hate no longer, and equality in humanity is our only way to go.
As a new age is dissipating our darkness, it is only fitting to say: “Welcome to Gaza New World Order.”